Envisioning Information

Recently skimmed through this book "Envisioning Information" written by Edward R. Tufte. Though it is published in 1990, the concept of visualization is kinda useful.

I did not read closely page by page, basically I just look at the graphs and try to get the idea of what he is trying to explain. Not bad! Below I would like to list the chapter titles of this book, which are the main concept of thinking about visualization I think.

Micro/Macro Readings
Layering and Separation
Small Multiples
Color and Information
Narratives of Space and Time

Definitely I will come back and read through the whole book in detail. But for now I just wanna get some idea whirling in my head when I am searching for ideas.

Arc diagram

This is a current project I have been working for a while. Check out Shape of Song, Martin Wattenberg created this way to visualize a song, but from midi data, which you know exactly the notes. What I did is using the similar arc diagram on real audio data, to be specific, on the feature extracted from real audio data.

From the plot, basically the structure of the song is described. The idea of this arc diagram is that when those two points are identical (highly similar) you draw an arc line to connect those two dots. So when there are repeated patterns, they will be displayed. I am still exploring different features to be used while the same time trying to figure out better way to put the information in this plot. BTW, this song is a classical piano song "Fur Elise" (aka the trash truck song in Taiwan if I did not mix match).

Visualization

Recently I am pretty into information/data visualization. The idea is to explore some ways to visualize music in different levels. Level here means from within a song level to further the whole music collection level.

So the idea for visualization is to show something human might not be able to perceive if they are described in the old ways. For example, when you are listening to music, it is harder to tell the structure of the music (verse vs chorus, how many times the chorus got repeated, so on and so forth). However, those information can be easily shown by a simple 2-D plot. This is just one application and we believe that there are much more possibilities out there for exploration. If the plot does not mean anything, at least it needs to be beautiful and pleasant to see.

Just had a meeting with my adviser who also has an engineering background and claim that he does not really know about aesthetic. Oh well, neither do I... I just started to read the book "Visualizing Data" by Ben Fry, a guy from MIT media lab who did his PhD work in "Computational Information Design" and also the co-inventor of a well known visualization sketch tool called "Processing". I do not have much to discuss about the book yet, so far I can see that the whole process of visualizing data is laid out in the book. And I have played with processing a bit, pretty friendly and intuitive programming language.

Good start though, will see how far I can go, probably will go take one to two classes about visualization and graphical design next semester in order to learn the thinking process of a designer. Looking forward to it!